News

CDE Identifies State’s Lowest Performing Schools

Tue, 02/5/2019

The California Department of Education has quietly released a list of the state's 780 lowest performing schools. The list was compiled in accordance with a 2015 federal law that requires states to identify the bottom 5 percent of schools, as well as those where certain groups of students require “targeted assistance.”

A spreadsheet containing the list of California’s lowest performing schools can be found here (see 2018-2019 ESSA Assistance Status Spreadsheet link under the “Data File” heading). Schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District are featured most prominently, due in part to the sheer size of the district.

There is already criticism over how the schools were identified. There are also concerns about what — if anything — the districts will do to improve student performance at the troubled institutions now that they’ve been identified. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to review and approve plans for improvement. But Carrie Hahnel, co-executive director of the state advocacy organization EdTrust-West, is skeptical that the list will result in little more than finger-pointing.

“There are a lot of questions whether any real accountability and oversight are going to happen, even if new plans are going to be developed in the first place,” Hahnel told L.A. School Report.